The Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona and its MIS Department are proud to host the Hoffman E-Commerce Laboratory, providing instructional and research support with a focus on providing access to high-end hardware and software technology and facilitating collaborative projects between the University and private industry.
| Welcome to the Hoffman E-Commerce Lab's New Website! |
|
| Written by Edwin Skidmore | |
Fall 2007 is almost upon us, and to help launch another great year of high-end technology services for the Eller College of Management, I have not only redesigned the Hoffman E-commerce Lab's website, but have also implemented a new content management system (CMS). What is the new CMS? After evaluating the field of content management systems, I selected Joomla! (yes, the exclamation mark is part of the name), a free and open-source software (FOSS), based on LAMP (Linux, Apache, Mysql, and PHP). The benefits for using Joomla! are enormous and multi-faceted. I will share a few of the important benefits with you.
 One benefit of Joomla! is its extensibility. If I need a feature, there is an excellent chance someone has developed that feature as an free extension or even a commercial one, which usually has a nominal fee or subscription. I merely need to search the primary Joomla! extensions repository to find what I need. On the rare occasion I cannot find one that is suitable to my needs, creating a new component or module is relatively simple with a bit of reading and knowledge of PHP.
Another benefit of Joomla! is the large community of developers, experts, and users willing to help each other with problems and issues. I can search the primary forum site for Joomla! or I can search forum sites created for the specific extensions. If I really have an inclination to pay for support, there is always the option to find one of many companies that exist to provide support for Joomla! This large community of developers and experts also help distribute information about security and technical issues when they arise, generally with a patch or an update made available soon after.
Lastly, and arguably the best reason for selecting Joomla! and FOSS in general, is the zero-cost licensing, which is not the case for commercial products that may cost thousands of dollars in license fees not to mention support costs. Just because the licensing is free doesn't mean one shouldn't pay for the software product. A good deal of open source software relies on users donating back to the community.
Although I am a huge supporter of free and open source software (FOSS), I will be the first to concede that FOSS should NOT be used for every project -- there are many factors that must be weighed before implementing an open source solution, such as the maturity of the OSS project, the level of expertise of the project staff, interoperability with other software, and implementation timeframes. But, for the right project, FOSS can lead to enormous savings both in time and development costs.
For more information about free and open source software, you can visit a couple of websites (searching the web will provide countless other resources):
Please feel free to contact me if you would like more information or would like to comment about Joomla! or the new website.
Thank you,Edwin Skidmore Lab Manager Update 8/10/2007: For kicks, I did a Google Trends search of the top 5 Open Source CMSes for 2006 (Joomla!, Plone, XOOPS, Drupal, and e107), all of which I have evaluated in the past. Of course, there are many assumptions that must be considered when you view the results of Google Trends, but it is interesting nevertheless. Click here for the Google Trends search Incidentally, Joomla! and Drupal tied for first place for the 2006 Packt Publishing's Open Source CMS Award. Voting for this year's award is happening right now. You can guess for which CMS I'm casting my vote. |
|
| Last Updated ( Friday, 10 August 2007 ) |
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
